![]() Perhaps the closest recent analog to “Midnight Special,” “Looper” not only boasts a similar melding of independent and genre film sensibilities, but it also places at its center a somewhat ambivalent, super-powered child, whose parents will do anything to protect him. Aside from keeping it to younger, prepubescent kids (so no “ Carrie“) and excluding comic-book or young adult-based movies in which the child may develop his/her superpowers at a young age (like “ Superman,” or “ Harry Potter,” for example), our only guideline is that the films should be at least watchable (a surprising number are not) and should in some way hinge on the contradiction that is a child with distinctly un-childlike abilities and skills. READ MORE: The 30 Best Horror Films of the 1990sĪnticipating the release of “Midnight Special,” we’ve taken a moment to highlight 15 other examples of supernaturally powered children from the better films on the subject. ‘Adventure Time’ Is Slowly Going Off the Air, And Everyone’s Moving On This puts his parents and their collaborators in the terrifying position of having to protect something they do not understand: they cannot even know if he is a force for good or evil, only that he is a force, he is in danger and he is their son. This theme crops up again in this week’s “ Midnight Special” from director Jeff Nichols ( our review here), in which the boy in question, the son of Kirsten Dunst and Michael Shannon‘s characters, has immense resources of potentially destructive, potentially Messianic powers that he is barely able to control. It’s a concept that Hollywood has exploited time and again, sometimes for comic but more often for dramatic or horrific purposes. So the idea of the child endowed with unnatural powers that render him or her less than innocent, good, or obedient is fundamentally unsettling. We have such deeply-set assumptions about children and childhood - innocence, powerlessness, fundamental “goodness” - that any challenge to those notions is often met with incredulity or defensiveness.
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